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After a summer break from ScorchCAD development I am back at it. The latest version of ScorchCAD is available on Google Play. ScorchCAD is also now available on the Amazon App Store.

Here are the highlights of the new features:

Hull

Multmatrix

2D shapes (circle, square, polygon)

2D boolean operations

Resize

Intersection_for

Nested for loops (i.e. for(i=[1:5],j=[1:5]) )

Polyhedron

norm

cross

min

max

Additionally there are some usability changes. ScorchCAD will now backup the current data in the code editor when the compile button is pressed. This data is reloaded when a new session of ScorchCAD is started. This will allow for data recovery in the event of a crash. Additionally ScorchCAD is now associated with *.scad, *.stl, and *.dxf file extensions. So from a file manager you can click on one of these files and ScorchCAD will show up in the available programs to open the file. File associativity also works for *.scad files in e-mail attachments.

Over the Memorial Day weekend I made this newton’s cradle for my kids. I used some 5/8 inch ball bearings I had left over from another project. Instead of trying to drill into the bearings I choose to injection mold a plastic ring around the bearing. This allowed me to tie the strings to the injection molded plastic part rather than directly to the ball bearing. Below is a picture of one of the ball bearings with the ring molded around it (and the aluminum mold). The plastic was molded right onto the bearings inside the mold.

I used fishing line to tie the bearings to the frame. The fishing lines for each bearing are passed through a small holes in the top board and wrapped around a screw. Turning the screws on the top board adjusts the length of the strings to fine tuning the alignment of the bearings. Aligning the bearings is critical to getting good performance from the newton’s cradle.

The injection molded collar for the bearings was designed on my Android phone using ScorchCAD while I was at one of my kids baseball practices. I exported and STL file for the mold from ScorchCAD and created the g-code file for my CNC mill using MeshCAM. So unless someone protests I am claiming I made the first physical part from a part designed from start to finish on a smart phone using ScorchCAD. A screenshot of the ScorchCAD part is shown below.

ScorchCAD (A clone of OpenSCAD for Android devices) is now available on Google Play: ScorchCAD. There is also a new ScorchCAD webpage here: ScorchCAD Web Page. I will continue to work on supporting more features in future releases. below are the details from the Google Play listing.

ScorchCAD is a clone of OpenSCAD written for Android devices. This program executes OpenSCAD code and displays the resulting 3D model. ScorchCAD aims to provide the same functions as OpenSCAD but it does not use the same source code. Most of the basic features are currently working. Additional features will be supported in future updates.

This is my second short update of my progress on ScorchCAD (A clone of OpenSCAD for Android devices). I am slowly adding more features and improving the user interface. I have also been testing with some of the sample files provided with OpenSCAD (see the animated GIF) Here are some of the recent improvements:

Separated the input editor from the viewer screen and added a separate console screen for messages.

ScorchCAD is a side project that I have worked on for a while. It is a clone of OpenSCAD written for Android devices. It is a clone of OpenSCAD meaning that it aims to provide the same functions as OpenSCAD but it does not use the same code. So far ScorchCAD is written completely in Java (OpenSCAD is C++). The ScorchCAD program is to a point that it can take input (OpenSCAD code) and return the result to the screen. The features that are working right now are: cube, cylinder, sphere, translate, rotate, scale, union, difference and intersection. There is a lot of work left to do on this program including all of the little things like opening/saving files. The constructive solid geometry (CSG) library is CSG.js converted to JAVA. There have been a lot of improvements to that library by the guys at OpenJSCAD. I either need to upgrade my JAVA code to incorporate the OpenJSCAD improvements or go to a different CSG library (Maybe one written in C++). The video embedded below shows how things are coming along so far.